Staff Fullstack Engineer
Remote • Remote - Americas or EU
Posted 4d ago
Job Location
Remote - Americas or EU
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Categories
Applied AI Engineer
About the job
We are seeking a Staff Full Stack Engineer to lead the technical direction of the team responsible for Alpaca's Trading API product. This product serves developers, traders, and institutions, and the team owns the entire customer experience, from platform access and account security to the applications used for trading. The role involves working across the full stack, including customer-facing trading applications, identity and permission systems, and integrations for partner apps and AI agents. This is a high-trust domain where system defects can have significant consequences, so we are looking for an engineer with proven experience in building and owning critical systems like identity, authorization, account models, and financial applications. While you won't manage people directly, you will lead through architecture, code, design reviews, and mentorship, acting as the senior technical anchor for the team.
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture and technical roadmap for customer access and usage of Trading API, including identity, authentication, authorization, permissions, account models, OAuth, and trading applications.
- Design access models for complex account structures (multiple users, sub-accounts, entity/advisor accounts, delegated access) with explicit, auditable, and server-enforced permissions.
- Lead technical delivery of next-generation Trading API customer applications for real-time market data, order entry, and positions/order views.
- Drive the migration from legacy monolith endpoints to a dedicated application backend with clear API contracts.
- Set the security standards for customer-facing systems, including session/credential handling, MFA, passkeys, OAuth, rate limiting, and input validation.
- Establish standards for safe delivery, including feature flags, staged rollouts, preview environments, testing strategies, and production observability.
- Partner with Product, Design, Compliance, Security, Brokerage Operations, and other engineering teams to define behavior and integration boundaries.
- Lead design reviews and mentor engineers to raise the overall engineering bar.
- Act as a technical escalation point for production issues and drive durable prevention measures after incidents.
Requirements
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time on both backend services and customer-facing applications.
- Proven ownership of a production system where defects could expose customer data, grant incorrect access, or cause financial loss.
- Deep experience with authentication and authorization (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, session/token management, MFA, role/attribute-based permissions).
- Strong backend expertise in Go, or deep experience in Java, Kotlin, C#, or Rust with a willingness to work with Go.